CF West sometime member Tom McElroy has been traveling in the interior of South America and he sent this picture of two hunters from deep inside Ecuador. All these guys do is hunt and fish, all day long. Full paleo diet –hunted and gathered fresh daily. Zero sugar, no starch (some tubers, maybe?). The guy in the red shorts holding the monkey (that he just speared) is 60 years old! Tom said the guys are just beasts. They are out hunting all day, and move in anaerobic bursts for about 5-10 minutes at a time – sprinting, swinging from trees, hurling spears, and wrestling wild pigs and tapirs to the ground.
Hmmm…kinda makes one think.
Partial squats are never good. They neglect the hips and hamstrings. When an athlete stops above parallel, his/her knee joints are forced to halt the downward momentum. But once the athlete foes below parallel, that stress is transferred to the more powerful muscle groups in the hips (glutes), lumbars, hamstrings, and adductors. Full squats keep all these muscle groups proportionately strong.
Bill Starr, PH.D.
John Hopkins University
Not that I have much to add to anything said by someone like Bill Starr, but it has always seemed to me that if we weren’t meant to squat deep, then our knee joints wouldn’t bend as far as they do. I know that seems kind of stupid, but think about it. If it was damaging for our knees to be bent completely, why would they be so easily able to do so? With every other movement full range of motion is never argued. Everyone knows that a chin up has to have the chin over the bar. That’s why it isn’t called a nose up.
Look at the legs of the gent on the left in the pic above. He has probably never sat in a chair in his life. I also would be willing to bet that he does not have any knee pain or damaged knees from it. Our bodies have been around in their current incarnation as homo sapiens for a pretty long time. Movement, diet, training. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that it’s already spelled out for us.
“CrossFit–Taking you back 50,000 years.” I have got to get that t-shirt made.
Workout:
3 Rounds
3 Deadlifts 315/195#
6 Overhead Squats 135/85#
12 Pushups
24 Double Unders
Post WOD and score to Comments.
wardrobe doesn’t look fully paleo. hard to believe the diet is also fully paleo
wow! look at the other guys quads, that would take too many hours at a gym to get those beauties!
Good point Jeff and thanks for visiting our site and commenting – but I don’t think that clothing is necessarily an indicator of how these people eat. They don’t eat paleo because they think it’s healthy, they eat paleo because it’s what they have available to them. Tom McElroy, who took this picture, used to be the head instructor at Tom Brown’s Tracker School and has been teaching wilderness survival and primitive skills for close to two decades. He’s also visited and worked with various indigenous peoples from around the globe, and I think he would be the first to tell you, that people that live like this (and anyone in a survival situation) are going to use whatever is readily available to them, be it a wooden spear, or a Ford leaf spring, grass skirt, or a pair of red swim trunks. They would probably happily eat a twinkie if you gave it to them, and then go back to eating monkey and tapir the very next day.
Great Shot!
Chasing down wild game would be a good thing to work into the WOD. How about using Mowgli as a substitute for a wild pig?
p.s. I only mean chase him, of course, not eat him.
Yeah, where are their breechclouts? Poseurs…
Nice pics, excellent article.
Thanks.
Jay
You had me worried for a moment, Colin.
Great piece, love it. But everyone knows this paleo thing is just “psuedo science”!
Well Robb, you don’t see any fancy letters after my name!
Thanks for commenting.
Ha! I hope you know that was in jest. The paleo concept offers predictive value for everything from health and wellness to fueling and athletic training. Dobzhansky’s quote get’s right to the heart of the matter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_in_Biology_Makes_Sense_Except_in_the_Light_of_Evolution
Keep up the great work!
Robb Wolf is my nutrition expert hero:)
Jocelyn-
Nutrition and training gurus REALLY love to work with talented, hard working, mentally unbreakable athletes. It makes us look like we know something ;0)
Good luck at the games Amiga! Your awesome attitude is as impressive as your athletics.